Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine.

Elinor embraced me, and I felt certain at that moment I would do anything for this woman, anything she asked of me. “Good, then,” she

have made a list of all who have succumbed so

Plague-scoured village, the names of all its three hundred and three score sorry souls pinned to the map like insect specimens on a board.

But it does make a distinction—it selects the very young over the very old. Almost half of the dead here have been not yet sixteen

We must arm the children, make them stronger—give them weapons with which to fight. We have been trying,

is find all the herbs of a strength-giving virtue and combine them in a tonic to fortify the healthy.” And so for the rest of that

Avicenna, a Musalman doctor who, many years since, had set down all his learning in a vast canon. When we had the names of the plants, we went through the herb bunches, trying,

Nettle for the blood. Starwort and violet leaves for the lungs. Silverweed to cool a fever. Cress for the stomach. The worts of blow-ball for the liver, bat-weed

here? Charity is a capable girl, but a ten-year-old cannot be expected to raise a brother and run a farm ...” Mr. Mompellion laid his large hand tenderly upon Jakob Merrill’s face. “Hush now, for I hear your concerns.” His voice was low and even. “And now I tell you this: do

Brand is here for you: a good young man who has shown much character and has no place of his own in the world. Make him part of your family, Jakob, so that he might stay on here as he is, and so you will give to Charity and Seth an older brother to care for them.”

had written his own name instead of Jakob Merrill’s and then

give all my estate, house, land, goods, and chattels, moveable and unmoveable, quick and dead, that it has pleased God, to endow me with, to my son Seth, my daughter Charity, and to Brand Rigney, formerly servant of Bradford Hall, whom I do assign

as my heir equally with mine

cure for his malady was a little continence, for I wanted his help that day, and I would be hard pressed to get it if I angered him.

way fire and water, the power of opposites, could be harnessed to do the work of many miners’ hands.

Merry looked concerned. Miners’ children are quick to learn what miners fear. And there are so many fears that go with fire-setting.

The fumes from the smoke,

The cracking can free hidden water, letting in a torrent that floods the mine. Or, as hap...

dangerous is fire-setting, and so unpredictable in its effects, that its use is prohibited unless one gains the consent of all miners working

cracks and working with the wedge to widen them. When I had a large enough line in the rock, I showed Elinor how we needed to stuff the greenwood boughs into every crevice, hammering each as hard as we could deep into the crack.

fire flared, and it was dark no longer. The greenwood began to heat. The sap hissed, and then came the first sharp report as the expanding pressure cracked a rock. It was hard,